Promoted Listings Changes - Ads Attribution

[pidgeun1]

How do we know if the listing was clicked by a buyer or some eBay employee who is testing their website? Previously, it was always the same buyer buying the item. How can eBay ensure they are excluding employee clicks?

[jonatjonatjonat]

Only eBay themselves could possibly confirm that so you might want to ask the question in th me weekly chat they do on a Wednesday at 2pm.

it would be possibly though to isolate eBay staff if they were on select IP addresses though.

[vinylscot]

I don't think they would be quite that blatant. However, it still happens occasionally now that virtually ALL of my auctions receive exactly one view, at pretty much the same time, soon after the listings had begun. It's less often now, but used to be quite common, and eBay would explain it by saying that it was their automated processes making random checks on listings.

I wonder if that practice will stop or not. I'm unlikely to be around for tomorrow's chat, but maybe somebody will bring it up.

[superchallenge]

Probably fair to say that if they wanted to scam you out of promoted advertising fees, they wouldn't bother clicking. Wouldn't take much to mark millions of items as "clicked" when they haven't been.

[valueaddedresource]

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@pidgeun1 wrote:

How do we know if the listing was clicked by a buyer or some eBay employee who is testing their website? Previously, it was always the same buyer buying the item. How can eBay ensure they are excluding employee clicks?

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@pidgeun1 the short answer is that there is no way to actually verify clicks even actually happened, let alone who they came from and there never has been.

Promoted Listings has always been something where you just have to "take eBay's word for it" when they say a sale is attributed to an ad and that part hasn't changed - the only thing that is changing is the types of actions eBay can say should incur an ad fee.

As I've said before in other thread about this though, I don't believe malicious/fraudulent clicks are the biggest problem. Sellers should be more concerned about non-malicious but still no intent to buy clicks that are far more common and will lead to far more ad fees being charged under the new model - like clicks from other sellers who are doing item research or looking for an item to "sell one like this" from.

[vintage-emporium-jedburgh]

We treat promoted  as a self applied %  final cost fee

We dont worry about who clicked and when 

[pidgeun1]

I agree with @valueaddedresource . By rigging the system, eBay will be able to attribute more item sales to Ads. Sellers may feel that promoted listings are working to a great extent as most of their promoted items will be sold via promotions. There will be no chance for the promoted items to be sold organically anymore. eBay will also be able to grab more fees from the seller without adding any value to the seller or doing any additional work. They might as well create a global rule that any sale of promoted items on their website will be subject to Ad fees. Maybe its on the cards for next quarter.